[ad_1]
Key events
Australian overboard on cruise to Hawaii – reports
There are reports that an Australian man has gone overboard from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship from Brisbane to Hawaii.
The ABC is reporting that the US Coast Guard confirmed that an Australian is missing after going overboard from a cruise ship off Hawaii.
Two travel bloggers on board the Quantum of the Seas ship have posted this video of the search efforts to Instagram and described the situation for other passengers:
The signal went out around 11pm and shortly after, we could feel the ship slowing and turning around. There were multiple announcements going through the whole ship, including staterooms, for certain guests to contact guest services. We were all told to go back to our cabins and make sure everyone in our party was accounted for. Turn sound on for the last video to listen to one of the announcements.
…Around 12.30am, a final announcement was made saying the search would be continuing but guests could leave their cabins and services across the ship would reopen.
We are back on course this morning heading for Hawaii and haven’t yet heard any further updates.
Allow Instagram content?
This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.
Almost $4bn to strengthen defence bases in northern Australia
Daniel Hurst
The federal government will today announce more details of its defence plans, pledging to spend almost $4bn to harden bases in northern Australia over the next four years.
But this funding will largely come from shifting money from other defence estate programs.
The defence strategic review, released on Monday, called for a stronger network of bases, ports and barracks across northern Australia.
It said it was “imperative that our network of northern bases is urgently and comprehensively remediated”, including work to make air bases harder to attack, boosting runway capacity, improving fuel storage and supply, and extra security.
The deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, and the defence industry minister, Pat Conroy, will visit Darwin today to announce funding of $3.8bn to harden northern base infrastructure over the next four year budget period.
This funding is expected to include about $2bn for “critical air bases stretching from RAAF Base Learmonth (WA), through Cocos Islands and our airbases in the Northern Territory to RAAF Base Scherger (QLD) and RAAF Base Townsville (QLD)“.
The overall figure also includes $1bn for land and joint estate capabilities. This includes major training area upgrades in the Northern Territory and upgrades to Robertson Barracks in Darwin and Lavarack Barracks in Townsville.
The government will also pledge maritime estate investments of $600m, including for additional work at HMAS Coonawarra in the Northern Territory, upgrades to HMAS Cairns, and redevelopment of the Harold E Holt Naval Communications Station in Western Australia.
The fine print is that the $3.8bn in funding comes through a combination of $3.6bn reprioritised from other now lower priority defence estate projects and $200m from other cancelled or adjusted defence programs.
Tamsin Rose
NSW Health launches working group to boost staffing levels in hospitals
New South Wales health department officials and nursing union bosses will join forces as part of the new government’s plan to improve staffing levels in state hospitals.
The government will today announce the establishment of the safe staffing working group, which will first be tasked with boosting the number of nurses in the state’s stretched emergency departments.
The working group will meet for the first time in early May and be asked to provide advice on the reform plan that will then be rolled out across other hospital departments including intensive care units and maternity wards.
NSW premier Chris Minns said:
I’m committed to ensuring the people who looked after us during the pandemic feel looked after by their government. This is the first step to safe staffing in hospitals – ensuring there’s one nurse for every three patients in ED. It was one of the very first election commitments we made.
Health minister Ryan Park said:
It won’t be easy to undo a decade of rising wait times and understaffing, but this government is determined to begin to turn things around.
The new Labor government has committed to hiring an extra 1200 nurses and midwives before the next election.
Good morning! Thanks to Martin for kicking things off, I’m Natasha May and I’ll be with you until the afternoon.
Treasury needs evaluator general, says Ceda
Paul Karp
The Committee for the Economic Development of Australia will today call for the government to establish an evaluator general, a function in treasury that checks which programs are working.
Ceda analysed 103 federal, state and territory programs. Of the 20 federal programs analysed costing more than $200bn over the decade, Ceda found 95% had not been appropriately evaluated while one quarter had no evaluation framework at all.
Programs with poor evaluations included:
-
The cashless debit card, which had an evaluation with a “flawed methodology and no cost-benefit analysis”;
-
Jobactive, which had an “evaluation framework but did not address all aspects of the program”; and
-
The National Rental Affordability Scheme, which had “no processes in place to evaluate whether the scheme had achieved some of the objectives identified, including whether it had any flow-on effect in the housing market”
Ceda chief executive Melinda Cilento said:
The community rightfully expects that taxpayer funds are used to effectively improve economic and social outcomes for all citizens, but too often this is not the case.The Albanese government has committed to improve practice in this area, including the likely introduction of an evaluator-general. We must take steps now to improve evaluation, starting with major community services.
Labor committed to an evaluator general before the 2019 election. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, recommitted to it in March 2022.
In November, he told the economic and social outlook conference that he was “by working with [assistant treasury minister] Andrew Leigh on putting in place an effective and rigorous evaluator-general so we have a better sense of what works, and what doesn’t”.
Leigh is speaking at Ceda on Thursday, so there’s a good bet Labor will recommit to this idea.
‘It is a horrendously complex system’: Clare O’Neil on migration
Home affairs minister Clare O’Neil commissioned a review of the country’s migration system last year and will flesh out the government’s new policy to fill worker shortages exacerbated by the pandemic when she addresses the National Press Club on Thursday, reports Australian Associated Press.
She told ABC’s 7.30 Report on Wednesday night:
Our migration system is broken. It’s not delivering for Australians. It’s not delivering for our businesses and it’s not delivering for migrants themselves.
It is a horrendously complex system that makes it really hard to bring high-skilled workers into the country who will lift productivity.
She said for employers in tech-based industries, for example, the skills list was “archaic” and “out of date”.
O’Neil said wage exploitation of temporary migrant workers was also rife and needed to be curbed.
She warned Australia risked falling behind other developed immigrant countries such as Canada by becoming a nation of “permanently temporary” residents.
Read our full report on the review here:
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our rolling coverage of the day’s news. I’m Martin Farrer and I’ll be bringing you the overnight stories before my colleague takes over.
Yesterday it was a long line of Labor backbenchers, and today it is a former Reserve Bank governor telling Jim Chalmers he has to raise the jobseeker rate. Bernie Fraser says the Albanese government “needs to start using its power for the people like it promised it would”, as he added his weight to the idea. He said the unemployment payment was one of the “many areas desperately needing attention” in the coming budget.
And that pre-budget manoeuvring continues with defence minister Richard Marles due to announce today the allocation of $4bn to strengthen defence bases in northern Australia.
Today the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, will stand up at the National Press Club in Canberra and declare the migration system broken. She will release a landmark review of the system. The review claims the system encourages 1.8 million guest workers to be “permanently temporary” due to strict caps on permanent migration. And although it’s not clear how many of the review’s recommendations will be implemented, O’Neil will warn that it can’t be fixed “by further tinkering and incrementalism”.
We also have a lot of reporting around the cost-of-living crisis this morning, with research suggesting that the social divide between Sydney’s western and eastern suburbs – along the so-called “latte line” – is deepening. And with landlords ramping up their rents, one in five renters are among more than 1 million people living in poverty in the state. The data on this issue is coming in thick and fast: a study by Anglicare says less than 1% of private rental properties are affordable for full-time workers on the minimum wage. And the latest Grogonomics points out that although the cost of living crisis is easing, renters are still feeling the pain.
[ad_2]
Source link
